


At the Side of A Narrow Island

by coldcobalt



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Clothing Kink, Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, M/M, Reference to Child Abuse, emotions about accents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-04-11 13:16:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19110445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt
Summary: A Watchmen drabble collection.Latest update:"Eye of the Beholder"-It’s a suit he’s staring at: affixed to a mannequin with the utmost precision, fabric sleek and charcoal-grey. The surface shimmers like wet asphalt and for a second, it seems almost, almost tasteful.





	1. Non-Rhoticity

The night’s stakeout is a bust—due to bad information or a bad informant, you are unsure; the hijacked barge you both have trekked out to intercept has utterly failed to materialize. Happy Harry will learn his lesson tomorrow, finger by ruined finger.

Next to you, ever-comfortable with heights, Nite Owl leans against the interlocked struts of the Whitestone Bridge, drinking coffee from a well-worn thermos. The East River runs sluggishly beneath you, thick with contaminants: the city’s own personal Lethe.

The threat of snow hangs heavy in the air.

\------

“So, you were born here, grew up here,” Nite Owl says; you do not correct his misunderstanding of your childhood, something you have fostered with intentional half-truths. “Why don’t you talk like it?”

You say nothing. The Rorschach you had envisioned at twenty-four was neutral and uncorrupted; not tethered by geographic ties, the claustrophobic confines of a million fire escapes.

“—Something about how we don't pronounce our ‘r’s" he continues, "some city trait. You don’t have it.”

 _Non-rhoticity_. You know this. You had written the term in tight capitals in your journal, underlined it twice and smuggled the speech therapy book out of the NYPL with perfect intent. Watched the movement of tongue and lips and teeth in your mildewed bathroom mirror, and if you couldn't change your filthy red hair or your height or the circumstances of your birth, you could at least change _this—_

"Terrible accent," you say. "Chose to remove it."

(At Charlton, an aide had once jokingly called you _Brooklyn_ and you had been horrified; your entire history laid bare by your disobedient tongue. You hadn’t yet glimpsed the breadth of New York’s depravity but had known, nonetheless, what the association had meant.)

By the time you’d met Nite Owl on patrol—a fated meeting, some would say; inevitable—your voice had been reborn: guttural, monotone, as featureless as oblivion.

“What are you getting at, here?” Nite Owl’s eyes narrow behind the goggles. “ _I_ have that accent.”

(He does, undeniably; his flattened “t”s and absent “r”s all running together in a way that whispers _New York, New York_.)

“Like I said: terrible.”

He laughs at that, low and intimate, breath frosting in the coming dawn.

And then Nite Owl leans in close, passes you the thermos, winds one muscular arm around your back in a gesture that has become all too familiar over the past several weeks. You tamp down the _(fear)_ unease that rises at the invasion of your personal space, stare out over the wine-dark water as it flows out to sea.

When he touches his lips to your jawline, feather-soft, you are left speechless.

You have reforged your tongue into a weapon of its own, have re-wrought your voice to featureless perfection. Yet you still can’t bring yourself to say what you really want.

Mercifully, Nite Owl doesn't ask you to.

\-----

Later, as snow cascades outside the brownstone’s windows and Daniel comes undone beneath you (half-clothed, babbling, perfect), you decide the accent is tolerable, after all.


	2. Assessment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Walter scrubs his cheek with the back of his ten-year-old hand, squares his shoulders, and lies._

_What do you see?_ they ask, holding up a card, and he wants to cry because he just doesn’t _know—_

(The inkblots resolve themselves into outstretched hands and gaping mouths and figures making animal sounds, but in the perfect black-white of sudden clarity, he understands that voicing this will only make things worse.

There’s a right answer here but he doesn’t know what it _is—_ )

So Walter scrubs his cheek with the back of his ten-year-old hand, squares his shoulders, and lies.

"A pretty butterfly."

Another card.

"Some nice flowers."

(His mother backhands him with a sweaty palm, and a white flash of pain engulfs the world)

The overhead bulb buzzes, buzzes; the metal chair is hard and cold and he is sure he will be caught. But across the table, the doctor smiles and makes a note on the clipboard.

-

 _Two crooked ribs_ , he hears them say, _evidence of a bad break in the past. Malnourished, cigarette burns on his shoulders. But relatively well-adjusted, considering—_

The person on the other end of the line says something he can’t hear, and the doctor hangs up.

Inside the precinct room, Walter digs his fingernails deep into his forearms, squeezes his arms tight, tight; he holds himself together so no one can see the monster that writhes just beneath his skin.

-

He is put in a too-big suit, and shipped over the river.

-

Over the span of years, he continues to conceal his violent nature, learns to tamp down the incandescent fury that threatens to devour him from the inside out.

And in 1964, when he holds a scrap of shifting fabric in his hands and new purpose in his heart; the first choice he has ever made of his own free will, missing nothing but a name—

He knows there’s a right answer then, too.


	3. Eldridge

1965\. The storm descends all at once, a howling tempest lashing the city with singular fury. Rain beats sideways like fists against the alley walls. 

The neon lights of Chinatown run to greasy smears on the street; Rorschach squints into the fray, but it’s futile. The world has condensed down to the span of brickwork: twenty feet, the thundering flow of water. There is nothing else.

Nite Owl yells something above the din: _storm_ and _too heavy_ and _short-circuit_ and the grounding weight of a glove is braced against Rorschach’s shoulder, leading him—

\-----

“A little water,” Rorschach grouses, flicking the cuff of his suit in distaste, spattering water on the wooden floor. “Could have managed.”

The disused building they have broken into is wreathed in darkness, emergency lights the only thing glowing in the gloom. The interior is in flagrant disrepair, wood panels spiderwebbed with rot and left to moulder. Their quarry—a pickpocket, an unskilled one at that—is long gone by now, Rorschach expects, has descended back into the seething underbelly of the city like so much refuse. A waste of a pursuit.

Nite Owl presses a button on his goggles. In the darkness, something flares blue, a failing circuit spitting a shower of sparks as it dies. He toggles the switch a few more times, futilely. “Goggles aren’t designed for that much rain. I’m running blind: no heat signatures, no nothing.”

Rorschach has warned him about exactly this—dependence on tools, equipment, _gadgets._ These items are bound to fail at inopportune junctures, are no more reliable than the door they have just ripped from its mooring by sheer force of will. 

He prepares himself to give his partner this well-deserved lecture, but then Nite Owl looks up to the ceiling and freezes, mouth opening in an idiotic gape. Rorschach follows his line of sight, up, up, past the surprisingly intricate ceiling, arches interlocking into infinity—

The far wall is the focus of Nite Owl’s fascination: an immense stained glass window, dust-covered and cracked under the weight of centuries. Somewhere beneath the grime, its surface whirls with innumerable thousands of stars. 

The silence stretches. Nite Owl’s mouth is still open.  
  
“I—wait, we were on Canal, made a right,” Nite Owl’s eyes dip shut, calculating. “This must be the synagogue on Eldridge.” His voice is pulled tight with something like awe. “Must have been incredible in its glory days. Pretty incredible _now_ , really.” 

Rorschach says nothing, face carefully neutral even under the mask. His apartment is on Orchard Street two blocks away, a corner unit in a tenement creaking under a fifty years of deferred repairs. In truth, he has walked past this building’s facade a thousand times and cannot see any reason to care: _The New Frontiersman_ has told him all he needs to know.

He motions with an impatient tilt of his head, arms crossed. _Move, Nite Owl._

Their original target has long since slipped their grasp, but they can perhaps still stop a rapist, a murderer, anything to save this patrol from complete futility. Better use for their time than squandering it in this forgotten place.

One hand on the broken door, Rorschach turns back to his partner.

Still halfway across the room, the stark planes of his costume catching the halflight, Nite Owl mouths something voicelessly. His whisper is consumed by the darkness and dispersed, nearly unheard.

_Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam..._

Their eyes meet. 

Nite Owl’s jaw closes with an audible snap. Inexplicably, his goggles are off, hanging uselessly from a strap around his neck; he seems uncharacteristically meek without them. He jogs across the dust-covered floor, striding up to meet Rorschach without a word.

(His eyes, Rorschach notices, are brown.)

“You’re Jewish.” Rorschach says. It isn’t a question. Nite Owl shrugs in response. 

“Didn’t expect...don’t seem like it”.

In the dust-strewn silence of the temple, Nite Owl’s sarcastic laugh is too loud, out of place. _“Seem_ like it?”

 (And Rorschach does not pay any mind to dark eyes ringed in dark lashes; the civilian features of his partner’s face laid bare before him for the first time.)

Nite Owl grimaces, drops his voice down into a parody of himself. “ _Oy gevalt._ Happy?”

“Better.”

Nite Owl rolls his eyes in exasperation, pulls the goggles back up. The persona reemerges: self-assured, authoritative. 

“You can be a real asshole sometimes, you know that?”

They step out onto the threshold together. By the time the wooden door is wrenched back into place—Nite Owl’s request, a gesture protecting the building against future, similar intrusions—the rain has stopped.

\-----

The next time Kovacs passes the synagogue on the way to the factory, he glances momentarily at the cracked glass windows, the intricate spires reaching towards the sky. Towards the stars.

He thinks of soft blue light and warm brown eyes, and wonders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Eldridge Street synagogue](https://www.nycgo.com/images/venues/2317/museum-at-eldridge-street-julienne-schaer-027__large.jpg), for reference. 
> 
> The building fell into disrepair sometime in the mid-fifties and remained abandoned until its restoration in 1980 or so (or so says Wikipedia).


	4. Eye of the Beholder

“Huh. Wow.” 

Wearily, you look up from the slush-covered sidewalk. The night is wet and slick with sleet, blacktop coated in a thin veneer of ice; inside your shoes, your toes cramp with cold. A thankless, miserable patrol, but a necessary one nonetheless. As they all are.

(In truth, the heat in your apartment turned off two days ago. On patrol, at least, you are warmed by exertion.)

When you turn, Nite Owl is a quarter of a block behind, standing motionless in the glow of a department-store window. It’s a suit he’s staring at: affixed to a mannequin with the utmost precision, fabric sleek and charcoal-grey. The surface shimmers like wet asphalt and for a second, it seems almost, _almost_ tasteful.

Ridiculous. Institutions like these are a testament to excess, a place where the too-rich can flaunt their material wealth at an unwilling audience; a holding pen for customers grown fat and complacent on their ill-deserved spoils. Clothing is meant to be utilitarian: to fulfill a purpose, and nothing more. 

You glimpse the price tag and scoff. Frankly, the lengths that some go to satisfy their vanity are sickening.

Another gust of sleet, sharp as razor-wire. Nite Owl continues to talk.

“—I mean,” he continues, “don’t get me _wrong_ , I’m a fan of the purple pinstripes. But something like this, on you? I think you’d look good.” A warm hand cups the back of your neck, and under the latex, you feel your traitorous skin flush.

Nite Owl laughs, facing back to the warm glow of the window. His expression is wistful, lapsing into softness the way it sometimes does when he believes you aren’t looking.

 “Sorry,” he says, still smiling. “I know it’s not your style.”

(You pick at the worn fabric of your uniform: sensible, dependable. Color faded from years of use.)

You grumble and resume walking; after a moment, your partner follows. The suit remains in its glass-walled prison, forgotten.

\-----

The department store and its glittering wares far exceed your budget, so you pay the original suit no mind. But after a period of searching, you find a reasonable facsimile.

This purchase is an unwelcome extravagance, an expense you will just barely be able to shoulder, and when the teenager at the register sneers, you nearly abandon your resolve. But your covetous hands tighten on the secondhand suit ( _your_ suit, now: sleek, charcoal-grey); you recall Daniel’s smile and succumb to conceit.

“Look, you in or out?” the cashier says. “You’re holding up the line.”

You bristle, slam a handful of bills onto the counter.

“No receipt,” you spit. “Please.”

\---

The lapels smooth themselves under your careful hands, fabric dark as an unlit doorway, a subway tunnel crackling with static.

 If your fingers tremble as you fasten your tie, it is the winter chill, and nothing more.

\----

Rarely do you enter Daniel’s home through the front door, rarer still do you do so as Walter. Yet tonight you stand on his doorstep, missing the thick collar of your uniform as you hunch against the cold. 

When Daniel answers the bell, it is with barely-disguised joy. He ushers you inside, and the warmth of the brownstone is sudden and immediate. Sweat beads on your browline.

“Hey," he says, "I wasn’t expecting—”

You squeeze your eyes shut, and remove your overcoat.

When you look up, Daniel’s face is blank, lips parted. A prickling sweeps up your arms and neck, across your chest and face, and you _knew_ this was a mistake, a disgraceful display of vanity and nothing more, stupid stupid _stupid—_

Two hands come to rest on your shoulders; one step back, another, and your shoulder blades collide with the foyer’s wall. Daniel leans in, looming.

“So, uh,” he says, eyes wild, pupils blown. “Come here often?”

“Yes. This is your house. Do you have another concussion.” 

Daniel laughs at that, a low rumble. “Sorry, bad joke. Not a ton of blood in my brain right now.” 

He presses his torso against you, thick fingers lacing through yours, and you recognize he is telling the truth. You are unsure how to interpret the expression on his face.

“God. Walter,” he whispers; you can’t help but roll your hips in response, a slow grind that leaves you gasping. “That suit. Your suit. You look _incredible._ ”

His hands (familiar, safe) trace the lines of your lapels, slide lower to grip your hips. When he cups you through the dress pants, you acknowledge that neither of you will last long at all.

\---

The next morning, you dig the suit out from its temporary resting place, sandwiched between the wall and an errant couch cushion. Improper storage, but sufficient while you were otherwise occupied.

Vanity, you grudgingly admit, does occasionally have its place.


End file.
